Strictly Speaking on Caroline Bergvall
Featuring papers from:
Caroline Bergvall
Sophie Robinson
Nathan Brown
cris cheek
Laura Goldstein
Majene Mafe

Editor: Redell Olsen (London)
Managing Editor: Kai Fierle Hedrick (New York)
Designer / Programmer: John Sparrow (London)
Publisher: Kathleen Fraser

Susan Howe
Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum
Coracle Press, 2009
32 letterpress cards printed on Canaletto Liscio paper
in binders box 130 x 100. 300 copies
I copied these poems, almost verbatim, from typed identification cards placed beside items in display cases at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Memorial Museum founded in 1901 by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. The artifacts and memorabilia in their collection date from 1847 when Mormon settlers first entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake until the joining of the railroads at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869.

Pierre Joris
on Robert Creeley
from his new Salt essay book
Justifying the Margins 
(Salt 2009)
new at Sybil

-

Two Poems by Robin Blaser
from The Holy Forest
at IEPI

-

Michael Peverett's review of Leevi Lehto's Lake Onega and Other Poems

New at PennSound

How We Place African American Poetry, University of Wisconsin, April 2003
A.L. Nielsen writes of this reading: In April of 2003, Lorenzo Thomas and I appeared at a symposium at the University of Wisconsin organized by Lynn Keller, titled WHAT'S NEW IN AMERICAN POETRY. Lorenzo and I had by then been on many panels together, acting as a sort of roving tag team of poetry criticism. This time out, Lorenzo delivered a talk he called "How We Place African American Poetry" and I delivered a prepared response to his talk.

New author page for Christopher Dewdney

()()()

our only reading by
Ronald Johnson
(47:26): MP3
at Stanford University, November 19, 1989
reading was with Norma Cole (24:38): MP3

()()()(()

Robert Grenier
Interview and Discussion on 1959-1964 with Grenier, Al Filreis, Ron Silliman, and Bob Perelman at theKelly Writers Hous
on October 27, 2009 complete interview (1:16:28): 
MP3

& Grenier's earlier reading/talk on that same day at Penn:
(1:16:35): MP3 / MOV

+++++++++++++++++++++

New at Sibyl
Two essays by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
from Blue Studios
available from the University of Alabama Press
PROPOUNDING MODERNIST MALENESS: HOW POUND MANAGED A MUSE
LORINE NIEDECKER, THE ANONYMOUS: GENDER, CLASS, GENRE AND RESISTANCES

Not to miss ...
Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya
at New York University's Grey Art Gallery
till Dec. 5


all the images from the show here

===================

Has Robert Grenier gone conceptual? (Has he always been?) Is this repurposing, self-apprpriation, or just the evidence of love's labor?

Robert Grenier

A PRINTER’S GUIDE TO CORRECTED PROOFS / EIGNER COLLECTED POEMS (9/30/09)

(listed by volume & page number, in order of occurrence in edition)

excerpt: full guide at Grenier's EPC page

1. Vol. I, p. xvii (check dot above “the” (on proof page only?) & delete—not in original).
2. Vol. I, pp. xxvii-11-22-09iv (delete —mistakenly placed here; repeats pp. xxvii-11-22-09iv in Vol. IV).
3. Vol. I, p. 40 (fix broken “e” in “the”—not in original).
4. Vol. I, p. 41 (fix broken “e” in “enemy”—not in original).
5. Vol. I, p. 57 (fix broken “r” in “nursery”—not in original).
6. Vol. I, p. 58 (fix broken “r” in “surveyed”—not in original).
7. Vol. I, p. 71 (fix broken “m” in “time”—not in original).
8. Vol. I, p. 76 (fix broken “t” in “tread”—not in original).
9. Vol. I, p. 77 (insert space between “4” & “7” in date line—error in original).
10. Vol. I, p. 81 (fix broken “b” in “bush”—error in original).
11. Vol. I, p. 90 (fix broken “o” in “October”—not in original).
12. Vol. I, p. 105 (fix broken “y” in “musty”—not in original).
13. Vol. I, p. 139 (check smudge (on proof page only?) & delete as necessary).
14. Vol. I, p. 177 (delete space between “#” & “n” in date line—error in original).
15. Vol. I, p. 178 (fix broken “l” in “flagpole”—error in original).
16. Vol. I, p. 197 (fix broken “a” in “taken”—not in original).
17. Vol. I, p. 198 (check smudge (on proof page only?) & delete as necessary).
18. Vol. I, p. 205 (fix broken “b” in “imperceptible”—not in original).
19. Vol. I, p. 208 (check smudge (on proof page only?) & delete as necessary).
20. Vol. I, p. 210 (change “Marshal” to “Marshall” in footnote—error in original).
21. Vol. I, p. 238 (check 3 dots (on proof page only?) & delete as necessary).
22. Vol. I, p. 249 (fix black dot in “f” in “fat”—not in original).
23. Vol. I, p. 250 (fix broken “s” in “Mountains”—not in original).
24. Vol. I, p. 282 (fix broken “n” in “L’une”—not in original).
25. Vol. I, p. 283 (fix broken “a” in “coals”—not in original).
26. Vol. II, p. 289 (fix broken “r” in “Ares”—not in original).
27. Vol. II, p. 290 (restore “0” in “# L 1 0”—omitted in proof copy).
28. Vol. II, p. 305 (fix broken letters in “broken”—not in original).
29. Vol. II, p. 321 (check large dot (on proof page only?) & delete as necessary).
30. Vol. II, p. 323 (restore apostrophe in “# 3 i '”—omitted in proof copy).
31. Vol. II, p. 326 (fix broken “e” in “shepherd”—error in original).
32. Vol. II, p. 327 (fix broken “w” in “how”—not in original).
33. Vol. II, p. 331 (fix broken “a” in “all”—not in original).
34. Vol. II, p. 351 (check blotch (on proof page only?) & delete as necessary).

excerpt: full guide at Grenier's EPC page

New at Sibyl

Jean-Marie Gleize
on contemporary French poetry   

Où vont les chiens? 

[excerpt: read full essay here]

‘Où vont les chiens?’, ‘Where do the dogs go?’, this question is posed by Baudelaire in the last ‘prose’ poem (in Spleen de Paris) in order to evoke a kind of literature that would correspond with urban, modern life – a kind of poetry which is adapted to those ‘sinuous ravines’ of the cities where the ‘poor’ roaming dogs are, the famished dogs. This question is also relevant to poetry: ‘where does poetry go?’, ‘where do the poets go?’. 

This question has troubled me for far too many years, and this is the reason why I cannot separate my poetic endeavours from a critical reflection on these. This critical reflection constitutes both the context and condition for my poetry (which for me constitutes the conditions of legibility).
...
I reserve an important place for the historical line of theoreticians and practitioners of sortie critique: Rimbaud, Ponge and Denis Roche. This lineage within ‘poésie critique’ (or critical post-poetry) is characterised by foregrounding the principle of ‘de-lyricising’ poetry and by the search of some kind of ‘objective poetry’ (the latter is announced – but not defined – by Rimbaud in one of his letters ‘du voyant’). In our modern (or modernist?) tradition, there might exist a literal objectivism or an objective literalism (which, by the way, always refrains from calling itself by that name, to present itself like that or dogmatise itself as such) which is made evident in the works of Claude Royet-Journoud, Jean Daive, Anne-Marie Albiach, Emmanuel Hocquard, Dominique Fourcade…, oeuvres that are drawn upon as Sortiesprogresses. This corpus (which is objective objectivistic and literal), which represents the lineage of critique, has affinities with the classics of experimental modernism, the relevant inheritors of the historical avant-gardes: poésie sonore, poésie concrete, poésie élémentaire, poésie-action or performance poetry, which are e.g. represented by poets like Bernard Heidsieck or Julien Blaine, and it is also has affinities with the most recent generation, that which emerges during the nineties; the origin of this generation is centred on the publication of two volumes of Revue de Littérature générale (‘RLG’) in 1995 published by Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi at the publishing company POL; it is a book project which may partly be perceived as a manifesto (it being technical and practical rather than theoretical), the propositions in which many recognise themselves or against which they position themselves: C. Hanna, O. Quintyn, N. Quintane, M. Joseph….

It is necessary to direct our efforts towards a description of the way in which contemporary poetry is organised in France after the death of the avant-garde, after the death of the neo-avant-garde from the sixties and seventies, an époque where this movement was organised around the predominant groups of poets and magazines: the ‘textualists’ of Tel Quel, the ‘formalists’ of Change, and various groups inspired by them, along with groups in the periphery who were subjected to the necessity of not defining oneself in relation to or as a reaction against anything else but these hegemonic groups. In the eighties and nineties this field is dissolved, and one bears witness to a destruction of the field which, thus, becomes extremely blurred to the extent that everything from this time on can coexist; this allowed serious attempts at restoring traditional lyric poetry to reoccur; restoration, that is, a ‘return’ to a previous condition which is prior to the sterilising ‘catastrophe’ from the years where the systematic destruction of fundamental poetic values took place, i.e. the destruction of the lyric tradition: expression, the lyric I, emotion, metre and prosody, song… I am content to merely name in passing this moment, which is extremely interesting for the abundant resurgence of discourses which openly and aggressively are regressive (there are numerous texts that need to be looked out and analysed…).  It is in this context that I have proposed the idea (an idea that I pursue in Sorties) of comprehending the field after the sixties and seventies as a clear division into lapoésie (which I write as one word) and repoésie on the one hand, and néo-poésie and post-poésie on the other hand. The former willingly inherit the formal and thematic aspects of traditional poetry either to be legitimised by the ‘magistrates’ or incontestable ‘officials’ (Valéry in the beginning of the last century and Yves Bonnefoy today), or they inherit it as a reactionary mode: they are composed by the new lyric poets from the eighties, the re-lyric poets in continuation of whom a number of suggestions follow – from prosaic lyricisms to emphatic lyricisms (e.g. James Sacré and Pierre Oster). The latter part contains those who could be called the reformers or refounders of poetry, those who want to change poetry through a permanent reinvention of itself and its various forms; this is what I call neo-poetry, which is both the ex-formalists of Change ( they have close affinities with the Oulipo-group) and the neo-experimentalists (performance poetry, elementary poetry, etc.). They depend on the term ‘poetry’ in so far as they recognise themselves herein, but they also use it to flaunt a distance to what we understand by poetry. Last but not least post-poetry, i.e. poets who no longer define their poetic praxis in relation to questions which concern the intra-poetic debate: verse or non-verse, verse or prose, poem or non-poem, image or non-image etc.; poets who reflect on what they do, the non-identified objects that they produce, the ways in which their works circulate (in the book or outside the book), in another context. Just like the term ‘sortie interne’ applies to the ‘modernist critics’, it may also be used to designate the post-poets, and I believe it has an actual effect concerning the latter ones. All that is left to be done is to state that something different happens in different way. I.e. when one speaks of post-poetry you continue to place these movements in relation to poetry, in relation to the poetry from which they had sought ‘operation’ (to repeat Mallarmé’s comment on Rimbaud). Yes, but it is necessary to point out that there is a difference between post-poets and critical poets (non- or contra-poets), and this difference concerns 1.) the way in which they move outside any reference to formal, technical and theoretical questions, questions concerning poetry, so to speak, disregarding pretensions of novelty, 2.) the fact that the textual or other objects that they produce are very difficult to recuperate within any generic frame. I continue to assume that post-poetry is not an optical illusion. It tends to proliferate among us.

There is no doubt another possible way of understanding the term ‘sortie’. It is inspired by Francis Ponge and it is connected with the effort in prose, the effort to invent a prose in prose, it is the effort to exit the circle enchanted by stylistic sublimation and by the idealising poeticity or re-poeticity (the key word here is: avoid to ‘arrange things’…). This other way of perceiving the exit has to do with the role which may be attributed to the literary activity after poetry. Let me quote the very short text by Ponge (which I reproduce here) from Cahier de l’Herne:

This text is written in 1942. At that time, Ponge was a member of the Communist Party. As early as in the thirties he says that it is important to ‘teach everyone the art of founding your own rhetoric’, the art of ‘resisting words’; or phrased differently: to resist the dominant ideological discourse, which surrounds us, which traverses us, which we interiorise to the extent that we no longer speak but are spoken to. When Ponge wrote in 1942 that ‘je suis un suscitateur’ (‘I suscitate’) it did not signify that he wanted to found a literary movement, he simply declared and suggested that when all is said and done, the act of writing ispolitical. It is necessary to let those speak who do not speak or no longer speak.

We, the readers, must bear in mind that our culture juxtaposes politics and discourse and sense (the ‘message’); this is one of the fundamental aspects in what we name ‘commitment’; and politics is also juxtaposed with the technical modalities of representation, of mimesis; this is what we call ‘realism(s)’ which is/are historically inseparable from the social conscience of the artists and the writers: critical and romantic realism(s) in different guises of ‘socialist’ realism ...

read the full essay here

"Oúvont les chiens" is a talk given by Jean-Marie Gleize at the conference "Poetry Today" on October 20-21 2009 at Aarhus University, Denmark. The talk published here is translated by Louise Højgaard Marcussen & Lasse Gammelgaard.

Rosmarie Waldrop
on Close Listening

photo ©2009 Bernstein/Pennsound

Tan Lin
Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk
for Performa 09



full set of pictures

"Characterization"
The last night of my 80 Langton Street Residency
in San Francisco
January 1983
a talk and discussion
later trasncribed and edited by Bob Perelman
published in Content's Dream

now available at PennSound
as part of our current digitizing of the SF talk series
from Bob's tapes
mp3
(1 1/2 hours)

New on Sibyl
(Sibila's English language portal)

Upper Layers of the Armosphere

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko   

[on Alexei Parshchikov]

                     He was walking uphill, and it was as if he was tightening the strings with himself
                      and nut drawings were taking form.
                                                       -- A. Parshchikov, DACHA ELEGY

I’m not good with chronology, never have been. Everything happens now or didn’t happen at all. 

One the one hand, I am absolutely certain of my sensation of our absolutely unceasing, mutual mute speech, and on the other hand, everything  crumbles into splotches of color. Now that the “funerary feasts” have taken  place it is impossible to imagine. ...

read the full essay

translated from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
first presented at
Contact: A Symposium in Memory of Alexei Parshchikov(1954—2009)
Tuesday, November 10, 4:00pm-8:30pm
University of Pennsylvania
Organized by Kevin Platt
(at which I read AD's essay)

just out

American Poetry after 1975
edited by Charles Bernstein

a special issue of boundary 2
(Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2009) 

This issue offers a wide-ranging survey of poetic practice in the United States since the mid-1970s. Comprising scholarship, essays, and poems, “American Poetry after 1975” brings together notable senior critics such as Al Filreis, Marjorie Perloff, and Herman Rapaport, as well as younger critics who are redefining the field. The issue looks at new directions in American poetry as well as contemporary trends such as conceptual poetry; multilingual poetry; ecopoetics, in which writing reaches environmental concerns; and Flarf, subversive poetry that uses search-engine results, grammatical inaccuracies, and intentionally bad taste. 

Writing from the forefront of American poetry criticism, contributors to this special issue address topics such as the poetics of disability and the work of clairvoyant poet Hannah Weiner, ambience and the work of Tan Lin, intentionality and conceptual poetics, ecopoetitcs, the continuing influence of Wallace Stevens, and the use of found text in Susan Howe’s “The Midnight.” Two younger critics address their generation’s poetics, one by considering the social relevance of the lyric and the other by examining resistance to innovative poetry practice. The intersection of poetry and technology is explored in articles about digital spaces and radical poetry’s relationship with the digital archive. One contributor applies the work of philosopher J. L. Austin to the language of hip-hop and the work of rapper Rakim. Also included are four short poems, a panegyric for the poetics of sophism in critical discourse, and essays that address the aesthetics of sentimental poetry, "Flarf," multi-lexical poetry, and the poetics of place and site-speficity.

Bronx Museum of Art

PERFORMA 09
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 15, 1:00pm
North Building—2nd Floor
Admission: Free
Marjorie Perloff and Richard Sieburth, and Charles Bernstein
will discuss topics related to the legacy of futurism.

note also:
Nov. 15 Peforma events with Tan Lin amd John Yau

recommended:
David Antin
"Words to the Wise"
(2009)

Keith Waldrop

photo: ©2009 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

Close Listening
Art International Radio, operating at ARTonAIR.org
November 7, 2009

When I was in Århus, Denmark, last month
Jean-Marie Gleize and I noticed this paining of a private poetry reading in the Århus museum.
Jens Ferdinand Willumsen
Sophus Clausssen Reading Poems
1915

The Lady Lilith
[for Emma] 
(2009, oil on linen, 20 x 16 ").

Susan Bee
New Paintings
(2009)

• Angels in the Woods (16 x 20")
• Angel Sings (16 x 18")
• Behind Bars (16 x 20")
• Drive By (14 x 18")
• Girl by the Window (18 x 14")
• Harbor of Illusions (37 x 50")
• My Valentine (8 x 8")
• Shoreline Blues (16 x 20")
• Starburst (12 x 16")
• Woman Tormented by Demons (18 x 14")

The Gaze  
(12 x 16")

Sarah Dowling
Security Positions
Montreal: Snare Books
In these exquisitely reserved poems, the relation of person to body, stare to reflection, touch to sight is incised in a poetic dry point that cuts deep. Sarah Dowling’s Security Posture is both elusive and evocative. It shimmers with erotic precision.

Joel Bettridge
Presocratic Blues
Tucson: Chax Press
We breathe in Greek and exhale the pure products of Americana; a vernacular philosophy. Joel Bettridge not only knows this but has strummed it in poems witty, raucous, and bluesy.

Norman Fischer
Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons
San Diego: Singing Horse Press
Fischer's most rhetorically expansive book. In the four works that comprise this this book, Fischer absorbs the energies from his great translations of the Psalms and the narrative elan of Sailing Home and continues the self-reflective lyric work of his pervious books. In the "Voices" section he speaks through several personae, including one Reb Yosl of Kemenetz, "a simple tailor of Lithuania," whose prayers are tonic because so down-to-earth. Here's a poem called "Err" in the voice of Elena Rivera: "letters, not yet words // tear freedom loose // from rude wretched world". The final and longest section of the book, "Seasons" is vintage Fischer, a serial poem of mostly one to three words, clusterd in one tofour line stanzas: An astonishing and exuberant work.

Got to see this last night. Richard Foreman in classic form: part happening, part Dada, part Surrealism, part reverie, part Pirandello, part Brecht, part mesmerizing, always bend-bending; totally Foreman. Dafoe is a powerful counterweight to the Foreman circus, exerting a sheer physical presence as one of Foreman's recurring Quixotic figures (Don Juan, King Rufus, and the Mind King go to Poetry City).

The New York Public Theater
October 27 - December 6 
$65/$75 Saturday evenings. 
But for readers of this site:
$40 tickets.
Valid performances are 10/27--11/15. 
The code is SAVANT4